Tagged: grandma

November 29, 2012

Sex Poems for Ben

We’ll get to the sex in a moment, but first there’s some more drama breaking out about my grandma, and what’s going to happen to her. Or, more specifically, what’s going to happen to her money. Years ago, when she was making her will, she asked me what I thought of the whole thing and I told her in no uncertain terms that I have my own money, that I’m not at all interested in hers, and that there would probably be drama about it that I would actually pay to stay out of. So, she gave me two of my great-grandmother’s rings, and that was that. I am not in the will, I have no dog in this fight.

Now my only interest is an emotional one, and I’m struggling with where and to what extent that emotional interest requires me to stick my head in the Tasmanian devil style hurricane that is my family sometimes. So far, I’ve mostly kept my distance. I don’t have the money, time, or energy to be in the middle of this. I have concern for my grandmother’s well-being, but she seems to have no interest in anything. I’m going to stop by the house on Sunday to check in, hopefully nothing crazy happens while I’m there. Because we’re definitely in the crazy-times danger zone with that crowd. As recently as today, there was apparently a high pressure area (read: yelling and tears) hanging over the house.

On top of that, I took the day off work sick today, and I slept from about 9 a.m. to nearly 3 p.m. The stomach ache that grounded me is still hanging around, and I have no idea what’s up with that. I’m not puking, there’s no fever. It doesn’t get better or worse, food or no food, it stays the same. Honestly, the only time it doesn’t hurt is when I’m in the middle of eating. So if I can figure out a way to constantly eat from the moment I wake up to when I fall asleep at night, I’ve got this beat. Oh if only I were the obese stereotype so many people think I am!

It feels like I swallowed a large stone. And my body kind of wants to puke it up, but knows it’ll take a lot of energy, so isn’t really trying. It’s weird.

Anyway, in the spirit of making the whole world feel my pain, here’s some sex poems I wrote my awesome boyfriend.

You’ve reached inside my chest, up through my cunt and wrapped your hands around my heart.

One simple twitch makes me your puppet on metal strings pulled through my head

Put your mouth on my throat, rake your teeth on my skin

I’ll dance for you. I’ll dance for anyone you tell me to.

Make me beg for my own salvation

Push my face against the wall

Work my reflex

Hold my arms back

Take the things I wouldn’t give

Grab my hair in angry fistfuls

Pull the whimper from my throat

Know my truth, and make me pay

Teach me the lesson I never learn

Skin, blood, lungs, sternum
Out comes my heart to sit next to yours

Lay with me in this bent bed
Wound to wound under the plaster sky

September 17, 2012

Guess Who’s Back?

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you already know that we are once again, the owners of a much contested Rat Terrier named Pepper. I didn’t wake up this morning with the intention of getting her back, and in fact, in light of our conversation last week I called GBF this morning to check in and make sure he knew we’d be more than happy to take her. He told me it was still up in the air. So I kicked back and watched Romeos (I give it 8 out of 10, sometimes a little solipsistic, but still cute and touching.)

Anyway, by the time Romeos was over, there were two messages on my phone, one from my Uncle and one from GBF. Apparently, right after we hung up, GBF got his 30 days to quit notice from my grandma, and he decided that we should come and take the dog, since he had to get everything out of her house and garage and try and find another place. So Ben and I drove up and got her. This time, GBF signed and dated a note saying that the dog was ours. We’ll be getting her licensed as soon as we take her to the vet, get her a check up, microchip, necessary shots, and confirm that she has been spayed. So, no dicking around this time, the dog is really, truly, unequivocally ours.

She’s pretty excited.

And not very interested in staying still for a photo shoot.

Right after I took this picture, she ducked her head under my phone and licked my neck.

I don’t know if you can see it, but she has a little bit of a snaggle tooth, and her lip keeps getting stuck on it, so her face looks funny. We think it’s adorable.

I knew all along everything would work out fine, right?

Oh, and I illustrated another tweet. I think I have a new hobby.

He meant the dude was fat, and it’s hot. But I had other ideas…

September 7, 2012

And That’s How We Ungot a Dog

Last weekend has been so dramatic and so filled with ballsackery that I’m actually reading my own Facebook to remind me of the timeline.

Hold on, I have to get everything going the right direction.

All right, on Saturday I had to return Grandma’s house keys, so Ben and I headed up, making a few stops along the way that ended up taking most of the day. When I got to the nursing home, GBF was there, and as soon as I sat down he started passive-aggressively sniping at me about the dog. He said he “couldn’t imagine” the poor thing stuck in our tiny apartment (a “tiny” apartment he’s never seen, but has decided for the purposes of his guilt trip is practically a squalid box made especially for dog torture rather than the 900 square feet of ghetto fabulousness and it actually is). I bit my tongue. Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have, but I was determined not to hillbilly out and cause drama at the nursing home like the whole rest of my family had already done. So I didn’t point out that the dog cowers away from people, or that Grandma told me he fucking screams at her, or how she also told me that he used to hit her but that he doesn’t anymore, which means fuck all to the dog, because he’s still a giant scary man who screams at her.

I sat there listening to GBF back-bite my mother, my uncle, grandma’s best friend, my apartment, my ability to care for a dog, and me; after which he would swear up and down, in a well memorized speech about how he prayed to God and how he’s a changed man, and he’ll never ever do it again. Also, that he didn’t even really do anything wrong in the first place. “I mean, the judge dismissed the charges, didn’t he?” By repeating the same silly lie over and over, you only succeed in fooling yourself. Everybody else just thinks you’re a tool. I was glad to get out of there and go back home with Ben and Pepper.

Sunday was a lazy day, we went to Petco and bought the dog new everything, as well as a tag with our address on it, then later on we went to dinner and ate delicious tacos at JC’s Street Tacos. They’re new, so they didn’t even have patio furniture yet, but they set up a table outside for us since we had Pepper with us. Monday was the day the shit really hit the fan.

Since it was Labor Day, we had the day off. I slept in, and was woken up by a call from my grandma. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Grandma, what’s up?
Grandma: I need you to give the dog back.
Me: What?
Grandma: GBF won’t stop harping on it, he’s driving me crazy.
GBF (in the background): That’s not what I said.
Grandma: He won’t shut up about the damn dog, and he said I had no right to give it away, so I need you to bring it back.
Me: You can’t give someone a dog and then take it back.
Grandma: I’ll get you another dog

At this point I realized I’d been awake for about 9 sentences and I can’t deal with their shit in this state, also it’s ridiculous that she’s trying to get me another dog when I didn’t even want a dog in the first place, but now that she’s trying to take my dog I don’t want to give her back. I told her I had to think about it and got off the phone. While I was deciding, GBF called me about 5 times. “I have to think about it” is clearly not in his vocabulary.

I called my friend and talked to her, she suggested I make a pros and cons list, so I did. The pros were mostly that if I gave the dog back, we wouldn’t have to make the financial sacrifices we were going to make for her, and that we’d be able to bow out of the family drama at that point and have our regular lives back. The cons were that I’d feel extremely guilty about giving the dog back to the man that made her afraid of people in the first place, and that I really like this dog. After the pros and cons list was finished, Ben suggested that we go to breakfast so no decisions were made on an empty stomach. As a lifelong fatty, and generally rational decision maker, I felt the logic was sound. We talked about it while we ate, and Ben expressed his fears that if we didn’t give the dog back, GBF might retaliate against us physically. He is a sketchy bastard, who once got arrested for threatening to murder someone, who did just get out of jail, and who isn’t operating on all cylinders. And while those are hardly reasons he makes a responsible dog owner, they’re also reasons to steer clear of conflict.

With that in mind, I decided that I would give the dog back, but I would also say that me giving the dog back would be my last act as my grandmother’s advocate. My uncle is power of attorney anyway, it’s not like I ever had any real influence, I only tried to make sure her hospital stays were comfortable and that she had everything she wanted. I told her that I would not be calling to check on her, and I would not be talking to the hospital staff for her, and that I would not be put in the middle of her and her boyfriend’s drama again. Flatly, she said “OK” and we made arrangements for where GBF could pick up the dog. At some point she tried to justify herself to me, claiming that the boyfriend was just so pushy, that he was so upset about the dog, that she had no choice. Echoing her ‘OK,’ I told her I didn’t care and I hung up the phone. I immediately burst into tears. Not because of what I had said to my grandmother, I felt and still feel completely justified in my anger at her, but because of what I had done to the dog.

The psychological implications of handing over an innocent creature to my indifferent grandmother and her violent partner are not lost on me. What had been done to me 25 years before, I was recreating with this dog. The argument GBF makes for her being his dog is actually a fairly good one, namely that he’s the one who brought the dog home, and that my grandmother doesn’t even like the dog, and never wanted it. As it was with me, the responsibility of the dog was thrust on her by an outside party and she has provided the minimum standard of physical care and financial output while allowing her partner (for me it was my grandfather, for Pepper it is GBF) to abuse the animal in whichever way he sees fit. Although, in my grandmother’s defense, she made at least a minimal effort to remove me from the house before the sexual abuse my mother experienced started in earnest for me (there was a small bit of impropriety that, as I look back, seems innocuous out of context, but was probably the beginning of something serious).

Anyway, I felt like I was completely selling out this poor dog, who is a sweet, nice, obedient and loving pet, despite her poor treatment at the hands of my grandmother and GBF. I cried for the next 2 hours while we packed up her stuff and waited for her to get picked up. I ran over the conversations I might have with GBF when he came for her I planned to remind him that he’d agreed to give Pepper to me, and that a real man would stick to his bargains. I wanted to tell him that he was an elder abuser and that he would get his for using my grandma. But she’s a fully active participant in their relationship. She’s not some shy, retiring lady that suffers under the weight of this terrible relationship. Grandma is the type of woman who needs to find the craziest, most damaged person in the room so she can stand right next to them and never leave. She has always done that, and because of it she’s allowed her children to be abused, her animals to be neglected, and her own friends and family to be alienated from her life time and time again. Then, when she is alone with the man she chose, she cries wolf so people will come back to her and when they do, she gets upset that they are in her business, and calls them meddlers.

It took me a long time to realize that I was the only one getting hit in my house. Grandma used to pretend that we were the victims of my grandfather’s rage, that we were a team against his ogreish ways. But he never laid a finger on her. It was always me getting punched, and me getting told that it could be worse, and me getting new therapists whenever I told them what was really going on. My grandmother is a princess who builds her own castle, climbs up to the tower, and gleefully counts how many brave young princes get eaten by alligators in the moat that she dug.

I’m still upset with myself for giving the dog back. Every single person I talk to says I should have kept her. Despite this, I still feel (mostly) that what I did was the right thing for everyone involved at the time. The reason Ben and I don’t have a dog of our own is because we can’t comfortably afford to. When we have a dog, I want our dog to have the best possible life, and part of that preparation means not getting shanked by my grandma’s crazy jailbird boyfriend before that time comes. I also need to understand what belongs to my life and what doesn’t belong to my life. Taking possession of someone else’s dog so that they’ll stop fighting over it, or so that there is a modicum of peace in the family was an overstepping of bounds. Hopefully there won’t be a next time, but knowing my family there’ll be 10 worse next times. So next time there’s a situation where her animals might starve without my intervention, I don’t know what I’ll do, but I certainly won’t do what I did this time.

I’m writing this on Thursday night, 3 days after I told my grandma to fuck off with her boyfriend, and her dog and her drama. I haven’t heard from anybody in the family except a brief phone call with my mother where she cried and I said she should call me if she felt like it. The silence has been nice, but also sad. For all the running around I was doing, and all the hours and days of my own life that I completely skipped out on to take care of grandma and make sure she was OK, I am apparently not missed at all. I know, I told her to fuck off, and she’s done exactly as I asked. I have this terrible habit of accidentally doing for others when they could do for themselves, and then getting really resentful when I’m not appreciated for totally violating the boundaries of both myself and the object of my attention. Feels bad, man.

September 6, 2012

And That’s How We Got A Dog

The day after my meeting with mom was the day Grandma’s boyfriend got out of jail. She had been telling everybody in the family how it was over with him, she was tired of hit shit, etc. When he called me and told me that the judge dismissed his case, and he was back on the streets, I was surprised and unsure of what to do. Honestly, it never occurred to me that this was a thing that happened, I really thought that once you went to jail that was it and you had to stay there until your trial unless you had someone to bail you out. Since it was obvious that he hadn’t spoken to my grandma yet, I told him to call her and got off the phone as quickly as possible.

Eventually I got word that he was at the nursing home, and she was trying to break up with him, and my mom and Grandma’s best friend were supporting her. He wasn’t taking it well. For the next 5 hours, the saga of their break up raged through the nursing home as well as on my phone and my Uncle’s phone. Incidentally (or maybe purposefully) Ben and I had decided to go get new Samsung Notes from T-Mobile that afternoon, so I spent our entire time at the T-Mobile store pacing back and forth on one phone and then another, dealing with intermittent bouts of crazy family drama coming down the line. While Ben took care of buying our phones, changing our plan (I had literally 15 minutes left for 2 weeks and knew I’d need more) and transferring the information all while regaling the T-Mobile staff with stories of my increasingly crazy family.

From what I’ve pieced together from eye-whiteness statements, as well as what I heard on the phone, and what was told to me at the time, this is what happened. GBF showed up at the nursing home, thinking that since the judge dismissed the charges, that means that nothing really happened. Yeah, not like your girlfriend ended up in a nursing home because your ass was too in jail to take care of her or anything. Anyway, when the breakup started, he launched into his defensive argument, which was to alternate between claiming to have seen the light in jail, and yelling that she took his dog (the dog I had with me because somebody had to take care of her while he was in jail and grandma was in a nursing home.)

Doesn’t everybody see the light in jail? I have never met a codependent alcoholic (and I’ve met a lot) who ever came out of jail saying ‘no, that’s totally cool. I can do that again anytime.’ Whoever you are, when you have your back against the wall, you’ll swear up and down to change your tune, and whoever you are, you probably wont really. When caffeine was triggering depersonalization episodes everywhere I went, I was eager to kick it to the curb. But after one accidental full caff Americano with no ill effects, I’m back on the sauce like I never stopped. Humanity, as a whole is not that great with the concept of consequences.
If you really did see the light in jail, screaming and yelling when your ‘I saw the light’ speech doesn’t work is a great way to convince everybody that you’re a changed man. Especially since you got put in jail for screaming and yelling in the first place.

So GBF is trying to get Grandma to take him back, calling me on the phone saying that my mom and grandma’s best friend are bullying my grandma into making her break up with him when he’s the one yelling in her face that she has to take him back and then yelling all over the place and over the phone to me that I have to give his dog back to him… right now, at 10 p.m. on Friday night. Like I’m going to struggle through the sea of drunk drivers that is the city of Los Angeles in the (near) middle of the night just so that you can have a bargaining chip in a fight with your girlfriend. I. Am. So. Sure.

This face forever and ever.

He ended up calling me about 8 times, demanding that the dog is his and that I better give it back. He also tried to convince me that he saw the light in jail, that he prayed to a God he didn’t believe in “to banish that devil Satan from my soul” and that it worked, and now he’s cured of his alcoholism (this is real) like Charlie Sheen (OK, so he didn’t say Charlie Sheen, but everything else in that sentence is totally 100% real). He also cried about the dog and how much he missed her which is absolutely the wrong tactic to take with me if you want anything. Yeah, a lack of compassion is a character defect of mine, but the second somebody starts crying at me to get their way, they might as well just jump off a cliff for all the help I’ll give a whiner.

Anyway, after the 8th time this douche called me telling me that the dog they got together is now “his” dog, Grandma and him made a deal. They’d get back together and everything would go back to normal if he gave the dog to me. Which is interesting, because at no point do I recall saying I wanted the dog. I just didn’t want to go driving through the city in the middle of the damn night in order to give an angry drunk a dog right after he’d bee dumped and kicked out of his only home. The only thing this man owns is a scooter and some clothes (and maybe a dog, depending on how admissible shouted claims are to the courtroom of your opinion). It’s not even like he has a van to live in now that my grandma’s kicked him out.

In my ideal world, we’d hold on to the dog until grandma got out of the nursing home, and then we’d give her back. That way, grandma has to worry about her food, and exercise, and vet bills; something we’d have to make some budgetary sacrifices in order to be able to afford. Basically, all I wanted was for the dog to be safe and cared for, which is why it’s a mistake to take any responsibility for anything in my family because now we have a dog we didn’t plan for in the slightest. Ben and I talked about it, and decided that even though we didn’t plan on it, we could do it, that she’d be our dog and we’d take care of her and provide for her for the rest of her life. Thank God it was a holiday weekend, and we couldn’t have gone through with the financial plans we were going to make. As it was, we ended up buying her a bunch of stuff at the pet store, and sitting around planning for her future. Ben even said something to the effect of “this might be the first dog our kids play with.” Basically, I went from not having a dog and not really wanting one to day-dreaming about her being our family dog, and feeling really happy about that in the space of a couple of hours. I was so wrapped up in this sweet little dog that I completely forgot that I was breaking a cardinal rule of my life. I deluded myself into thinking that something (anything) good could come of me interacting with my puke bucket of a gene pool.

Anybody that follows me on Facebook will know that this is absolutely not the end of the story, and anybody that knows me in real life will notice that I don’t currently have a dog, because of course my family is shit and they would never do anything that turns out good. Like, ever. But I’ll stop here, because we ended Friday thinking we had a dog, and Ben, and the dog, and I slept peacefully in our bed, completely oblivious to the fuckery ahead of us.

Also, I can draw on pictures on my new phone.

September 4, 2012

The Time I Saw My Mom After 5 Years of Not Speaking

This is the most recent update to the continuing drama surrounding my Grandma’s hip replacement, her near fatal visit to The Californian, and her boyfriend’s arrest for elder abuse.

So Friday I said I’d address my meeting with my estranged mother. I guess that’s as good a place to start as any, especially seeing as how that’s the least dramatic, least stressful part of the last few weeks.

The day after the jail incident, I took a half day from work and went back to Pasadena to check on grandma and see if she needed anything. I also asked her if she wanted to bail out her boyfriend and she said no. She wanted me to call the jail for her and tell him that she was through with him. I told her that was a call she needed to make herself, and she opted to call my uncle and my mother instead and tell them she was through with him. My mom, who had been banned from her hospital room just days before for “making trouble” between grandma and the boyfriend, jumped at the chance to be included again. My uncle was supportive, but doubtful (as I was) that this was a permanent change of heart.

Grandma wanted mom to help her pay her bills, so I had to go let her into the house to get the checkbook and everything. I expected to come face to face with my mom at some point during Grandma’s recovery, and I’d previously resolved to make absolutely no drama about it. I headed up to the house with that in mind.

She was waiting in the garden, trimming the roses. I heard her before I saw her, she was mostly obscured behind a large plant. I knew from talking to Grandma that she’d started loosing her hair because of the chemo, and I wondered what she would look like. I’ve always thought my mother was beautiful, I guess every kid does, and I think there’s something that radiates from her, despite her insanity, or maybe because of it. It comes across as an easy spirituality. In recent years I’ve started to wonder if it was just mania. Whatever it is, I’m glad to report it’s still there. She seems smaller, more delicate, but baldness suits her. She looks like a little Buddhist monk. The image was compounded by the fact that she was wearing an orange top.

We got all the stuff she needed to get to Grandma, she played with the dog a little, and we talked about the situation, about my skepticism that this would be the end. I sort of asked how she was so willing to help after being unceremoniously dumped earlier in the week, she got a little emotional and said “Because I love my mom.” I didn’t know what to do with that, so I just shrugged and left it there.

When it was time to go, we hugged, she told me she loved me, and after a second, I said I loved her too. Despite everything, that’s still true. I don’t know if this is the beginning of something, or just a temporary adjustment to our regularly scheduled programming. In all the private writing I’ve done on her, and all the examination of our history and my motives, I’ve realized that I’m the one who keeps trying to act like my abnormal family is normal. A couple of weeks ago, I was writing about how, in high school my mom would do this thing where she would start yelling at me in the living room while I was asleep in my bed, storm into my room, grab me by the ankle and drag me onto the floor, then she would stand over me screaming, while I tried to figure out what was happening in a tangle of blankets at her feet. In conjunction with the nights that she would wake me up crying and tell me she wanted too die, these wake up fights were brutal for my sense of continuity. I sat with this memory for a long time, trying to figure out what it was I did to get myself in that situation. I was writing about our history in order to put it to rest, and to figure out what my own behavior patterns were that lead to me feeling so resentful of her. Not for her sake, but for mine, to try to beak the cycle.

I mean, a kid should have a reasonable expectation of safety in their own home, in their own bed, but I didn’t get that. And that’s not my fault, but what is my fault is that after the first time I woke up with my mother crying in my bed, or her standing over me yelling, I should have at least realized that it was no longer reasonable to expect safety in my home, especially considering how everything else was falling apart around us. But that’s not the conclusion I came to. Maybe because I’d already been conditioned for abuse, maybe because I was 16, and the prospect that my only viable caretaker might be heading off the deep end was too much for me, but I continued to come home with the expectation that it was a safe place. If she kept me awake half the previous night, I made the frequently incorrect assumption that she’d let me sleep the next morning. And and I didn’t just do this once, I did it over and over, until two years later when I finally told Kate what my home life was like and she pointed out that it was abusive.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I frequently find myself holding the shit end of the stick when it comes to my family, and not just because they’re bad people (they are), but because I keep taking the stick, thinking surely they’ve run out of shit by now. Slowly, painfully, I’m learning that there’s always more where that came from. Just because my mom didn’t do anything insane while we were at Grandma’s house sorting out checkbooks and shit doesn’t mean that we’re going to go skipping off into the sunset together. That was the assumption I made when I was a kid. If she’d been especially heinous, I assumed that meant she would be tired out, if she’d been especially good, I assumed that meant she was turning over a new leaf, and it meant neither. She was just being herself, and I could count on her to continue to be her unpredictable self in perpetuity, no matter what I did or didn’t do.

After the meeting with my mom is when the drama really kicked up. Every day has been worse than the last, but we’re already well over a thousand words here, so I’ll adjourn to tomorrow, when I’ll tell you about the next day, and Grandma’s boyfriend’s triumphant return.

August 31, 2012

Pepper’s Log, Stardate Yesterday

11:00 p.m. Marina shows up and we hang out for a little bit. Then I get to go on a WALK! to her car, which is cool.

11:30 p.m. Hang out in a nursing home parking lot, guard the car.

11:45 p.m. Hang out in a Sheriff’s station parking lot, also guard the car.

12:00 a.m. Attempt to intimidate the Jack in the Box teller into giving me delicious burgers. Does not work. Banished to back seat.

12:15 to 1:00 a.m. Driving. Kinda boring, Marina doesn’t like it when I step on the window thing and make it go down, so now the windows are locked. Sleep

1:15 a.m. WALK! Marina and Ben quietly cheer when I pee, I find this more than a little confusing.

1:30 a.m. Bath. Do not appreciate. Was gifted a squeaky duck as a peace offering. Gladly accept.

1:45 a.m. Cat makes scared cat sounds at me, but when I leave the room she follows, still making scared cat sound. Feel it’s best to ignore her. May not be stable.

2:00 a.m. Time for bed. More than a little excited to be allowed on a bed. Was encouraged to deescalate.

6:30 a.m. Alarm goes off, must ensure that my hosts have heard it. They seem ungrateful.

6:45 a.m. WALK! Nothing more to report, except that the same quiet cheering happens for poos as for pees. Still more than a little confused by it.

8:00 a.m. The worst has happened. I have been left here to die in this house. I’ve scratched some of the paint off the door, nothing more to do for it but have a final nap with squeaky duck before the darkness sets in. They left me a nice soft bed. Presumably it is for me to deposit my corpse into.

2:00 p.m. The best has happened! Marina came home! I was laying in my bed with squeaky duck, breathing my last, and then I was saved! Jumped over the couch as an expression of joy.

2:15 p.m. WALK!

2:15 to 3:45 p.m. Extremely boring car ride. Slept

4:00 p.m. I’m back at home! Do appropriate twisty circly dance.

4:30 p.m. Back in the car.

5:00 p.m. Hey it’s Frana! So excited, attempt to protect her from lady in wheelchair. Hurt lady’s feelings. Hurt feelings likely compounded by Marina telling the lady that “she never does this,” ensuring lady thinks I hate her specifically. Not personal, just unnerved by people with wheels instead of legs. May be a plot to harm Frana, can’t chance it.

6:00 p.m. Back home and Suzie’s here. She lets me lick her on the mouth and calls me Pepperoni. Other stuff happens, but it’s mostly boring.*

7:15 to 8:00 p.m. Car ride. Slept some more.

9:00 to 10:00 Trip to Petco, Target, and In and Out. Make it well known that I do not trust the largeness and whiteness of this Target. Whine until Ben parks the car facing away from it, but maintain that I will stare out the one window that I can see it from as long as we’re in the parking lot. This foul beast shall not best me!

10:30 p.m. WALK!

11:00 p.m. Back at Marina and Ben’s, do wiggly jumpy dance and immediately nap on the office floor. It was a hard day for all of us.

*If you’re wondering if this is me telling you, in the guise of a blog written by the dog that I saw and talked with my estranged mother for the first time in 5 years, the answer is yes. Because I am a grown up and I can handle real life… just as long as that life can be narrated by a rat terrier. I promise a more mature attempt to address this on Monday, but it’s late and we’re all worn out.

August 30, 2012

You Can’t Make This Up

It’s Wednesday night, I’m blogging this from my grandma’s hospital room. We’re currently waiting for the staff to bring a wheelchair so we can wheel her down to my car and I can drive her to a new recovery home, hopefully one that won’t ignore her and do their best to let her die like The Californian. The reason she’s going to a nursing home instead of her own home with her own boyfriend is because he got arrested today. While the hospital was getting ready to discharge grandma, the sheriff came up to her room and carted her boyfriend away for elder abuse.

I took today off work to rest because the weekend before had been so dramatic with family stuff (this was when we learned of the charge against grandma’s boyfriend) and hospital stuff (as a result of the ensuing fallout, mom is no longer allowed to visit grandma at the hospital) that I was no good to anyone. So while Grandma’s boyfriend was getting arrested, I was sitting on my couch in my underwear, playing Mass Effect. I got a call with the news and nearly broke my ass to get showered and people-ready. I called the hospital, explained what was going on while I was putting on my clothes, called my uncle, left a message while I was racing out the door, and got a call from my grandma’s boyfriend’s cell that turned out to actually be from the sheriff. He explained that GBF had the house keys and the car keys on him, which meant that if I wanted to get into grandma’s house (at this point, I still thought she was going home), I would have to come to the jail and get them. So, I mapped my new course and headed off towards the Sheriff’s office. Thanks to it being 3 p.m., my 45 minute drive only took an hour and a half, rather than the 2.5 hours it would have taken had it really been rush hour.

I got to the Sheriff’s office at about 4:30, they told me it was going to take a long time to get the property ready, so I went to a teriyaki place around the corner and scarfed down some truly horrible bento (my first meal of the day). I shouldn’t have hurried, because I didn’t get the keys (and everything else he was carrying) until two hours after I’d first asked for them at 7:30. During the wait, my phone kept me entertained. GBF called, told me where the pet food was, other details I’ll need to know, discussed the possibility of bail. Grandma’s best friend called me, we talked about how a person could get arrested for elder abuse when the elder in question has made no claims of abuse whatsoever, stuff like that. Ben called, we talked about dinner plans (that would be him eating his delicious chicken kebabs alone and me eating something purchased through a window.) Finally, I got the keys and arrived at the hospital at around 8. So that’s my evening.

Future plans at this point are to get grandma settled in the nursing home, make whatever arrangements she wants regarding her incarcerated partner, pick up grandma’s best friend’s granddaughter Nichole, who lives nearby to help me get grandma’s car back home at which point I’ll feed all the pets, make sure they’re safe inside and take the dog with me so Ben and I can watch her, take Nichole back to her house, buy the aforementioned window slop, and head home to my house. With the speed that everything else is going at, I expect I’ll get home around never. Ever ever.

Wish me luck!

Why couldn’t these people have been my parents?

August 24, 2012

Grandma’s Hospital Stay

So I mentioned that my grandma is in the hospital. It looks like she’s going to stay there for at least a couple more days. Then she might go to a convalescent home to recover some more, or she might go home and get a home care nurse. The story of how this happened is long and dramatic, and I have told it about a million and a half times.

Basically, what happened is that after her hip replacement surgery, she was supposed to go into a recovery facility called The Californian, where she’d get daily physical therapy before heading back home 100% healed and ready to carry on with her new hip. Instead, they watched her puke up all her food, and steadily decline in cognitive function while telling anybody that called that she was fine. We couldn’t talk to her ourselves, because their single cordless phone wouldn’t work in her room. Her boyfriend was there with her, and tried to tell them that her behavior was abnormal, but they ignored him. Finally, after 6 days of steady decline, her personal doctor came to visit and ordered her to the emergency room. She was re-admitted to the hospital where she’s been for a week now. Apparently, her potassium, sodium and electrolytes were all so low that she was very close to seizure and coma. The trauma has caused damage to her short-term memory that she may never recover from.

I’m absolutely pissed at The Californian staff, not just for letting her slip through the cracks, but also because when I called the hospital discharge coordinator to complain about them, they called me back and tried to smooth things over with me, but that only made it worse. I wish I had written down the name of the woman I talked to, but she claimed to be the manager at the facility. When I asked her about the nurses telling me and my family members that grandma was fine when she was clearly declining, she changed the subject. I tried and tried to get her to acknowledge that question, but she kept talking about her food intake, and her chart, and even complained to me that grandma’s boyfriend is too loud. I regret that I didn’t take a harder line on that, but I gave up and asked her about something I knew would have an easy solution. I asked her what they were going to do about the phone not working in all the rooms. She said maybe they should move the dock to another room. I asked her why they didn’t just get another phone for the other side of the home. She said she didn’t know if that was possible, which lead to me trying to explain how phone lines work. Then, even after me explaining that you just buy another phone and plug it into a jack, she said she didn’t know about that. She kept saying “I’m sorry,” then waiting for a long time, like I was going to tell her it was OK. It’s completely not OK. And the fact that this women thinks that she can let my grandma get this bad and not even try and address the problems her hell pit of a recovery home is suffering from is just insane.

So I’ll be filing a formal complaint with the Department of Public Health, in writing. That’s really all I can do at this point. There’s some talk of her going back to that place after this hospital stay is over, and I feel like that would be a terrible idea, but I’m not in charge. My uncle and my grandmother are, and there are other things to consider like availability, medicaid and what recovery homes her doctor will agree to visit. She’ll be getting a social worker soon, so hopefully we can get her an in home care person.

It feels very much that her being almost 80 years old factors into the kind of treatment she gets, and not in a positive way. I have nothing bad to say about the hospital she’s in right now, but I think that there is this idea in the medical profession that older patients are always going to be a little bit more fucked up all the time and then they die. And if I’m trying to be objective about it, that’s basically true. But those care workers at The Californian were out of line. I think that they were afraid of telling us what was really going on, because they’d lose the medicaid money they got from having her there if we knew. I don’t think I’ve ever hated a business before, but I sure do now.

Here’s grandma playing some solitaire on Ben’s tablet at the hospital.

August 8, 2012

Grandma’s Surgery and My Writer’s Block

So today (Wednesday) is the day my grandmother has her hip replacement surgery. Which means that I’ll have gotten up at 4:30 a.m. in order to meet her at the hospital in Pasadena at 5:30, where we will wait until 7 for her to go into surgery. After that I’ll drive back to L.A. and work a full day, and then I’ll come home to Hawthorne and completely collapse.

I’m writing this from Monday, where I’m already tired from worry and it’s getting in the way of my ability to write other things. Tomorrow, I usually go to my meeting after work, but there’s a massive chance that I’ll skip it in order to get more precious sleep. However, I’m already thinking that I should probably go to the meeting so my head’s on straight the next morning, when I’ll be exhausted and hanging out in a hospital with my grandma, her boyfriend, and possibly (but probably not) my mother, who I haven’t seen since May 19, 2007.

I already skipped my meeting on Sunday night because I wanted to stay on the couch and watch Warehouse 13 with Ben. Look, I know I’m a shinning example of the 12 step community, but they were bringing Agent Jinx back from the dead, and I couldn’t leave it like that, I just couldn’t! He’s fine by the way. My own fate is far less certain.

Probably the most fun thing about going to the hospital with my grandma is that we’ll be pretending that her boyfriend is her son so that he can be let into the pre-surgery room (whatever that’s called) and so that he can make medical decisions since he’s the only one of us that can be there all day with her. Us being me, him, grandma’s best friend, and my mother, who says she might not be able to come since she’s really sick from Chemo. Which is a totally valid reason not to go anywhere. It also makes me feel better since I’m not pushing my mom out by being there since she’s too sick to show up anyway. And it’s not like we really have to super-pretend that he’s her son. I don’t have to call him Uncle Grandma’s Boyfriend or anything, we just say it once and then everybody knows he’s her ‘son.’ Her extremely loving and devoted son (ick.) Whatever gets him in the hospital, I guess.

Anyway, I’m extremely worried about the surgery. I know that hip replacement is a relatively simple procedure, and that old people get it all the time, and it vastly improves their quality of life, that less than 1% of people die from the procedure, etcetera and so on. But I also know that grandma’s primary care doctor told her that she shouldn’t get the surgery until she put on weight, and that instead of gaining weight, she’s actually been loosing it since the doctor said that, and she’s going ahead with the surgery anyway. I also also know that the last time she had a major surgery, she had a stroke that left her legally blind and only functionally literate.

So, I’m worried, but this is a woman that had a procedure done on her leg a couple of years ago, and didn’t tell a soul, except the boyfriend who drove her to the hospital and then picked her back up again. It was relatively minor, but she was still in a cast and a wheelchair for 8 weeks. If it was up to her, we’d just kick her out in the hospital driveway without even stopping the car. Maybe we’d toss her walker out after her, and maybe we wouldn’t. Because that’s the kind of family she wishes we were: inconsiderate, uncaring bastards who would coldly leave their matriarch to die of hip replacement all alone in one of the best hospitals in the world. There, I said it.

Of course, I realize that her seeming apathy about the whole thing, and her annoyance that I would even show up for this is all a smoke screen, because this is exactly what I would do if something serious were happening to me. I mean, this surgery is all I’ve been able to think about for the last week, and instead of writing about it, I’ve written about nothing, and bushes. Because if we had a family crest it would be someone with a sword in their chest looking inconvenienced at having to croak on such short notice. Ignore it, pretend to be exasperated, but for God’s sake, never let the bastards see you squirm.

June 20, 2012

Dear Old Bitch: Next Time I Will Fight You

So this weekend, I decided it would be a good idea to take my elderly grandmother and her friend to a music festival in Old Town Pasadena where there’s no street parking, no valet, and neither of them can really walk anymore. Because I’m a genius. Also, I forgot to take pictures, so the whole thing was a complete and total waste.

Let's just assume that this is what everybody looked like that day.

In my own defense, I had no idea that there was a music festival going on. My grammar school best friend April Michelle and I planned a reunion, and since grandma and Lomie know her too, they were invited as well. I had innocently picked a restaurant in Pasadena (where everybody but me lives), that’s good for kids (April Michelle has kids), and didn’t think another thought about it until I was fighting through traffic just to drop grandma and Lomie off in front of the place, which lead to the encounter with the Terrible Old Bitch.

I had pulled up to the fire lane in front of the restaurant, grandma’s handicap placard clearly hanging from my rear view mirror, and as I was going around from the back of the car to the passenger side with grandma’s walker (obvious old person cred right there), this bitch in a dark red Camry started laying on the horn. I expected an angry douchebag in a cheap polyester suit jacket, but instead when I looked up I saw a tiny, ancient lady seething and punching the steering wheel, staring daggers at my grandma as she sat in the passenger seat waiting for her walker, which I couldn’t give her because this Camry was in the way.

Things I should have yelled at this elderly dickbag:

Where the fuck are you going? If you’re trying to escape the bony finger of death, it’s not working!
This is why your children never call you!
The early bird special doesn’t start for another hour, you cunt!
Shouldn’t someone this close to the end of their life be trying to get into Heaven?
You’re going to die alone!
I could have hit her car with my grandma’s walker (tennis balls first, of course)
You smell like cat litter from here!
Just because all your friends are dead doesn’t mean you can be mean to everybody you meet!
I hope your Social Security check gets lost in the mail!
If we ever do get nationalized healthcare, I’m nominating you for the death panel!
What’s wrong with you? You gotta seed under your dentures or something?
Is it time for your nap?!
Hey, no one honks at my grandma, you bitch!

But, I did none of those things. Instead, I just stood there making the WTF face 2 feet from her head (I seriously could have reached out, opened her door and smacked her with both sides of my hand like a pimp if I wanted) and she sat in her car and stared straight ahead like I wasn’t standing there making WTF face at her while she waited to merge into the other lane and drive around my open passenger side door. Then, I waited a full five seconds after she drove away to say loudly, and to no one “Well, someone’s old and bitchy.” Lomie agreed.